I. Love
Love is a near-universal experience and gets a huge amount of cultural attention, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to understand. In particular, it is hard to say just what love consists in, to explain what rationalises it (if anything does), and to make sense of its relationship to morality. Does it essentially and distinctively involve wanting to be with someone, or wanting things to go well for them? Is it fundamentally arational, or is it a rational response to a person’s good qualities, or their values, or their personhood? Is it in tension with morality or does it somehow belong to it?
This week we focus on the question whether love is justified by reasons or not, though many of the authors also offer views about what love is. (You can find work more focused on the latter question in the further reading.) Several of the arguments we consider this week invoke considerations that will have a part to play in our discussions in subsequent weeks.
Question: Is love rational?
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- Harry Frankfurt, ‘Autonomy, Necessity, and Love’, in his Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Frankfurt takes love to involve a concern to benefit the beloved. He argues that love is necessitating, and that actions performed out of necessitating love are autonomous, because when a person acts out of love, “his volitions...derive from the essential character of his will.” (This explains why betraying one’s love is a way of betraying oneself, too.) Love is therefore not a matter of choice; it is, as Kant supposes duty to be, a matter of ‘categorical imperatives’. But where Kant thinks that autonomy is achieved only through conformity to one’s purely rational will and therefore the impersonal moral law, Frankfurt argues that true self-government must be government by aspects of self that individuate us, as he claims our impersonal, rational will does not.
- J. David Velleman, ‘Love as a Moral Emotion’, Ethics 109 (1999)
Expounding a Kantian account of morality, Velleman argues love is not in tension with it, as many have supposed, but in fact a response to the same fundamental value. He argues against theories of love that take it essentially to involve aims (to be with the beloved, or to benefit the beloved, for example), instead proposing that love essentially involves an arresting awareness (mediated via the ‘manifest person’) of the value of the beloved as an end in himself that disarms mechanisms of emotional self-protection from others, as it disarms mechanisms of self-interested motivation in the case of the respect that morality requires. Velleman elaborates further on his view in ‘Beyond Price’.
- Niko Kolodny, ‘Love as Valuing a Relationship’, The Philosophical Review 112 (2003)
Kolodny presents a set of objections to anti-rationalist views (focusing on Frankfurt’s) and the rationalist views he takes to be the leading alternatives, namely quality theories and Velleman’s Kantian view. In their place he proposes the ‘relationship view’ that love is a matter of valuing and is rationalised by one’s ongoing relationship with the beloved and partly consists in and is sustained by the belief that it is. The relationship view, Kolodny argues, avoids the problems with its rivals.
- Neera K. Badhwar, ‘Love’, in LaFollette (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics (Oxford, 2005)
Badhwar argues, as against accounts of love that analyse it in terms of some sort of concern or desire, that love is “an ongoing affirmation” of the beloved as worthy of existence in her own right that has essential affective dimensions—in particular, pleasure in the beloved’s existence. She further argues that it is rationalised by complex qualities of person and character, rejecting views such as Velleman’s that don’t, in her view, sufficiently make sense of the selectivity of love.
- Troy Jollimore, ‘Love: the Vision View’, in Kroeker and Schaubroek (eds), Love, Reason and Morality (Taylor & Francis, 2016)
Jollimore defends the view that love is rationalised by the qualities of the beloved against the four key objections from universality, promiscuity, trading up, and inconstancy. The main idea is that loving someone involves a certain kind of increased sensitivity to the good qualities of the beloed and a certain blindness to the qualities of others.
- Kieran Setiya, ‘Love and the Value of a Life’, The Philosophical Review 123 (2014)
Setiya defends a view of the essential content of love as a disposition to give priority to the beloved’s needs, rather than a desire to benefit them or a Velleman-style arresting awareness, and of the rationality of love as given by the beloved’s humanity, rather than by her qualities, the lover’s relationship with her, or her rational nature. He then goes on to draw interesting conclusions with regard to the permissibility of saving the few rather than the many in thorny philosophical subject of rescue dilemmas.
- Esther Engels Kroeker, ‘Reasons for Love’, in Martin (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy (Routledge, 2018)
Kroeker gives a brief overview of the debate between rationalists, anti-rationalists, and hybrid theorists before going on to present her own hybrid view. According to Kroeker, love can be either a response to reasons or not, or it can combine rational and arational components.
- Christopher Howard, ‘Fitting Love and Reasons for Loving’, in Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics Volume 9 (Oxford, 2019)
Howard defends the Quality View of reasons for love against several objections, including the key objections from promiscuity, trading up, inconstancy, and universality. His main response to the key objections is simply to deny that fittingness implies decisive reason. Thus, for instance, from the fact that some quality of your beloved makes it fitting for everyone to love him, it doesn’t follow that everyone has decisive reason to love him.
- Yongming Han, ‘Do We Love For Reasons?’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (2021)
Han defends an anti-rationalist debunking of the appearance that we come to love for reasons. According to Han’s account, we come to have the desires constitutive of love for someone via a process of association with the satisfaction of prior desires to be around people with the qualities the beloved has. Thus the qualities explain but don’t rationalise the love. This deprives rationalists of one of the arguments for rationalism, and moreover, Han argues, since rationalists need certain anti-rationalist explanations whereas anti-rationalists don’t need any rationalist resources, the appearance turns out to favour anti-rationalism over rationalism, contrary to what is standardly supposed.
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Further reading (Hide)
- Adrienne M. Martin, ‘Love, Incorporated’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (2015)
Martin draws on a Kantian psychology in elaborating an account of love as incorporation into rational motivation of subrational motives. She argues that this accounts for a range of types and gradations of love and makes sense of both the rational and arational aspects of love, before defending it against important objections.
- Benjamin Bagley, ‘Loving Someone in Particular’, Ethics 125 (2015)
Bagley that leading accounts of love can’t adequately make sense of central cases of love in which lovers love their beloveds for the attractive qualities that make them who they are. Drawing on ideas about improvisation in music, he suggests a theory of love as involving the working out of indeterminate identities together that he claims does better and can answer the key concerns about quality views.
- Kyla Ebels-Duggan, ‘Against Beneficence: A Normative Account of Love’, Ethics 119 (2009)
Ebels-Duggan rejects the view (associated most with Frankfurt) according to which love centrally consists in taking one’s beloved’s well-being as a reason to act because, in failing to distinguish between a person’s rational aims and her well-being, it does not take the beloved’s agency or the reciprocity of loving adult relationships seriously enough. In place of this view she defends a Kantian view according to which love ideally involves regarding one’s beloved as having ‘selection authority’ and ‘judgment authority’, and therefore taking on one’s beloved’s ends and shaping one’s other ends in light of these.
- Monique Wonderly, ‘Love and Attachment’, American Philosophical Quarterly 54 (2017)
As against the common view that self-interestedness is inimical to love, Wonderly argues that an essential element of romantic love is attachment, which involves the lover’s taking the beloved to be important partly because the lover needs the beloved—a self-interested aspect of love, but one that adds to it rather than spoils it. Wonderly expands on the concept of attachment being invoked here and argues that it accounts well for the depth of romantic relationships and the nonsubstitutability of partners.
- Bennett W. Helm, ‘Love, Identification, and the Emotions’, American Philosophical Quarterly 46 (2009)
Arguing from a sophisticated analysis of ‘person-focused’ emotions such as pride and shame, Helm argues that love is a “distinctive kind of affectionate, identificatory commitment to another...that emerges from a rational pattern of person-focused emotions”. He contends that this explains the distinctive intimacy of (certain forms of) love without falling foul of egocentrism on the one hand and a conflation of love and mere concern on the other.
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II. Kant: acting from duty
Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is perhaps the greatest work of moral philosophy in the Western philosophical tradition, and certainly one of that tradition's great peaks. It is dazzling in its creativity, in its technical ingenuity, and in its ambition—although it can also seem forbidding, thanks to Kant's difficult style. From an analysis of everyday moral thinking that identifies the notion of a good will at its heart, Kant proceeds to argue that our very freedom depends on conforming to the moral law. On the way, he introduces ideas of universalisation and humanity as ‘an end in itself’ that have great resonance even for many of those who reject Kant's theory.
Question: Is Kant right to conclude that only action from duty has moral worth?
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- Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, edited by Mary Gregor (Cambridge, 1997), Preface (but you can skim this) and section I
Kant aims to work out the supreme principle that underlies moral thinking, and eventually to vindicate it. He starts by analysing the notion of a good will, which is, he argues, the only thing of unconditional moral value. The idea is to identify what a good will consists in, and thence arrive at its fundamental principle. As it will turn out in sections II–III, this principle coincides with the only possible “categorical imperative”.
- Stephen Darwall, Philosophical Ethics (Westview, 1998), pp. 144–154
Darwall offers helpful, clear exegesis of the Preface and section I of the Groundwork.
- Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge, 1996), chapter 2
After a brief account of the history of a debate between rationalist and sentimentalist moral philosophers (don't worry too much about which view is whose as you read), Korsgaard offers a careful reading of key passages in Groundwork I, defending Kant from some common objections and elaborating on some key notions. She then situates Kant's argument with respect to the historical debate.
- Bernard Williams, ‘Persons, Character, and Morality’, in Moral Luck (Cambridge, 1981)
Williams makes a case for the importance of character and personal relations and their independence from morality as understood in the Kantian frame, and accordingly charges Kantian ethics with a deeply impoverished account of individual agency that produces a misrepresentation of the moral life.
- Marcia Baron, ‘The Alleged Moral Repugnance of Acting from Duty’, The Journal of Philosophy vol. 81, no. 4 (1984)
Baron analyses the objection, sometimes levelled against Kantian ethics, that being motivated by duty is not essential to morally good conduct—indeed, that it is morally repugnant or alienating. (Williams is one proponent of this objection.) She considers several versions of the objection and rejects them all.
- Susan Wolf, ‘Moral Saints’, in The Variety of Values (Oxford, 2015)
In this influential discussion, Wolf argues against Kantian and other moral theories that the maximising ideal of moral sainthood she takes to be implicit in them should be rejected on the grounds that there are important values other than those of morality and self-interest.
- Jessica Isserow, ‘Doubts about Duty as a Secondary Motive’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research vol. 105, no. 2 (2021)
Isserow discusses the idea of duty as a ‘secondary motive’ that is appealed to by Baron, Herman, and others as a means of avoiding objections that Kant’'s conception of moral worth is too austere or involves a ‘thought too many’. Via an analysis of different interpretations of the idea, she argues that it is not capable of serving the purpose for which it is invoked, and concludes that a pluralistic approach to moral worth is to be preferred.
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- Michael Stocker, ‘The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories’, The Journal of Philosophy vol. 73, no. 14 (1976)
In this influential article, often cited alongside Williams’s and Wolf’s as the source of a deep challenge to Kantian accounts of acting well, Stocker argues that something important is missing in accounts of moral goodness that make the motive of duty central, as Kant's does: the accounts present a stunted version of the moral life.
- Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Harvard ,1993), chapter 1. (An earlier version is available here, but the book is preferable.)
Herman argues that acting from an interest in the rightness of one’s action is necessary to ensure that the action is nonaccidentally right and has moral worth as such, and then argues against some proposals as to the nature of the moral motive necessary for moral worth so understood. The difficulties with these proposals are solved, she argues, by distinguishing incentives from motives and recognition that the motive of duty can be a secondary motive.
- Jens Timmermann, ‘Acting from duty: inclination, reason and moral worth’, in Jens Timmermann (ed.), Kant's ‘Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals’: A Critical Guide (Cambridge, 2009)
Emphasising that the task of Groundwork I is to identify and analyse a case in which a person’s action is determined by the moral law rather than merely accidentally conforming with it (ultimately in order to reveal the supreme principle of morality as a principle of maxims rather than acts), Timmermann argues that the problem with acts motivated by endorsement of a principle of following inclination, for Kant, is that they lack the necessary connection with morality. He goes on to reject a ‘backup motive’ conception of the motive of duty necessary for moral worth, arguing that this conception is inconsistent with Kant’s insistence that morality is concerned with willing rather than effects.
- Christine Korsgaard, ‘From Duty and for the Sake of the Noble’, in her The Constitution of Agency (Oxford, 2008)
Korsgaard offers helpful explanation of Kantian moral psychology and exegesis of Groundwork I, emphasising in particular that for Kant moral value supervenes on an agent’s choice, before arguing that Aristotle shares much the same moral psychology and analysis of good action—and even uses an example like that of the philanthropist in the Groundwork to illustrate his. The biggest difference between Kant and Aristotle, Korsgaard suggests, lies in their different understandings of inclinations, which Aristotle sees as quasi-perceptual, aimed at presenting things as good, unlike Kant. But their basic ethical outlooks, she argues, are the same.<>/li>
- Julia Annas, ‘Why Virtue Ethics Does Not Have a Problem with Right Action’, in Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 4 (Oxford, 2014)
Annas asks how virtue ethics can make sense of the demanding character of rightness that Kantian ethics interprets as a matter of categoricity and necessity. After pointing out that virtue ethics avoids certain problems with Kantian views focused on this aspect of morality, she argues that virtue ethics can at the same time in fact make good sense of the demanding character of rightness, partly by distinguishing duties as a sub-class of right acts involving prespecification associated with roles and institutions from virtuous acts in which the agent’s virtues play a part in the specification, and partly by resisting the suggestion that the demands of virtue are somehow less strong.
- Nomy Arpaly, Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into Moral Agency, chapter 3
Arpaly defends a ‘quality of will’ account of the moral worth of right actions that makes it a function of motivation by the features that make the acts right and depth of concern with those features. This conflicts with Kant’s view insofar as it allows that Kant’s philanthropist’s sympathetically motivated actions can have moral worth and insofar as Kant has no analogue of the ‘depth’ clause.
- James Grant, ‘Moral Worth and Moral Belief’, Ethics vol. 133, no. 2 (2023)
Grant argues against the view that it is sufficient for your act to exhibit moral worth that you do the right thing for the reasons that make it right, which some (such as Arpaly) have defended in response to Kant’s claim that for your act to exhibit moral worth you must do the right thing because it’s right. The mainspring of his argument are examples of people who do the right thing for the reasons that make it morally required, but under the mistaken view that it is not morally required.
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III. Scanlonian contractualism
Scanlonian contractualism is a non-consequentialist moral theory according to which an act is wrong if and only if it is disallowed by a principle that no one could reasonably reject who was motivated to find such principles. Developed in the second half of the 20th century by T.M. Scanlon, it has become enormously influential in contemporary ethical theorising. Its key attraction is in the way it captures the idea that permissible actions must be acceptable from all reasonable points of view. But there are doubts about whether the theory is genuinely explanatory, about whether its avoidance of the unpalatable conclusions associated with consequentialism is gerrymandered, and about the way it handles risk, among other things.
Question: Does contractualism offer a compelling account of wrongness?
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- T.M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Harvard, 1998), chapters 4–5
In chapter 4, Scanlon sets out some challenges for a satisfactory moral theory, including the challenges of explaining the reason-giving and motivating force of moral judgment, and explaining morality's importance and priority in practical deliberation. He sets out the contractualist answer to these challenges. In chapter 5, Scanlon contrasts his contractualism with that of others such as Kant and Rawls, clarifies some of the terms employed in its master principle, and explains how it generates its verdicts of wrongness. In the process, Scanlon anticipates many of the main lines of objection to his view and tries to respond to them.
- T. M. Scanlon, ‘How I Am Not a Kantian’, in Derek Parfit, On What Matters, Volume Two (Oxford: Oxford, 2011)
In this comment on Parfit's On What Matters, in which Parfit claims that Kantianism, rule consequentialism, and contractualism converge, Scanlon describes some of the ways in which his contractualism departs from Kantian views.
- R. Jay Wallace, ‘Scanlon's Contractualism’, Ethics 112, no. 3 (2002), introduction and sections 3–4
Wallace provides helpful exposition of Scanlon's arguments and raises some illuminating doubts about them (many of which are further pursued in the other readings), although he remains very sympathetic to the contractualist project. Sections 1–2 are also highly illuminating and worth reading if you have the time.
- Pamela Hieronymi, ‘On Metaethics and Motivation: The Appeal of Contractualism’, in Wallace et al. (eds), Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon (Oxford, 2011)
Hieronymi anatomises Scanlon's contractualist account of moral motivation, arguing that the ultimate appeal of contractualism lies in an ideal of respect for each person, and that it is surprisingly difficult to combine this ideal with any theory of theory of what it is for an act to be wrong other than contractualism, despite some appearances.
- Elizabeth Ashford, ‘The Demandingness of Scanlon's Contractualism’, Ethics 113, no. 2 (2003)
Ashford argues that contractualism is just as vulnerable to charges of demandingness as its rival, utilitarianism. Indeed, she argues, it is more demanding, because it disallows any collective activity such as air travel that imposes even a remote risk of great harm to very few others, so long as the cost of forgoing that activity to any one individual is not greater than the harm in question.
- Rahul Kumar, ‘Defending the Moral Moderate: Contractualism and Common Sense’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 28, no. 4 (1999)
Kumar sets out contractualism’s advantages in making sense of commonsense morality’s commitment to options and constraints, contrasting its resources with those of consequentialism in this matter. In the course of doing this, he offers a clear account of the structure of contractualist moral reasoning and useful illustrations.
- Michael Otsuka, ‘Saving Lives, Moral Theory, and the Claims of Individuals’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 34, no. 2 (2006)
Otsuka criticises Scanlon's approach to ‘Saving the Greater Number’ cases, alongside some other similarly anti-aggregationist approaches. He then argues that the core ideas and attractions of contractualism cannot be preserved while rejecting the ‘individualist restriction’ that blocks aggregation in Scanlon's theory.
- Johann Frick, ‘Contractualism and Social Risk’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 43, no. 3 (2015)
Frick focuses on a problem for contractualism relating to the way it handles cases of risk. He asks: does it assess the justifiability of risky acts and policies by asking about people’s reasons for rejecting a principle permitting a risky act when the act is in prospect (‘ex ante’)? Or does it ask about those reasons after the outcome is clear (‘ex post’)? Scanlon explicitly favours ex post assessment in What We Owe To Each Other, but Frick argues that this rules out intuitively permissible acts and policies. Although he thinks it comes with significant costs, he favours ex ante assessment, and defends this view against objections from Scanlon and others.
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Further reading (Hide)
- Derek Parfit, ‘Justifiability to Each Person’, Ratio vol. 16, no. 4 (2003)
Parfit argues against Scanlon's ‘individualist restriction’ and some other anti-utilitarian views by appeal to some ‘Saving the Greater Number’ cases. He goes on to suggest that the core idea and appeal of Scanlonian contractualism is the idea of justifiability to each person, which survives the rejection of the individualist restriction. (Note that the numbers in Case 2, at p. 381, are misprinted. They should read: 100, 100; 100, 0; 0, 100.)
- T.M. Scanlon, ‘Replies’, Ratio vol. 16, no. 4 (2003)
In the course of replying to critics including Parfit, Scanlon clarifies aspects of the contractualist view.
- Rahul Kumar, ‘Who Can Be Wronged?’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 31, no. 2 (2003)
Kumar argues for a contractualist approach to the famous ‘non-identity problem’, which he thinks avoids the counter-intuitive implications that the non-identity problem is standardly supposed to have. In the process of doing so, he provides useful clarification of some aspects of contractualism.
- Philip Stratton-Lake, ‘Scanlon's contractualism and the redundancy objection’, Analysis vol. 63, no. 277 (2003)
Stratton-Lake explores the objection that Scanlon's contractualist principle adds nothing to the concrete considerations that ground reasonable rejection in explaining wrongness. He argues that the principle should be regarded as an account, not of the grounds of wrongness, but of its nature. He then suggests that in order to accept this reply to the objection, Scanlon must abandon the claim that wrongness is reason-giving.
- Michael Ridge, ‘Contractualism and the new and improved redundancy objection’, Analysis, vol. 63, no. 280 (2003)
Ridge suggests that, contrary to the arguments of Stratton-Lake (see the further reading below), Scanlon needs to hold on to the claim that wrongness is reason-giving, but that he can avoid the objections that Stratton-Lake takes this to generate once the relation and nature of the reasons for rejection and the reason that wrongness provides are clarified.
- Alex Voorhoeve, ‘How Should We Aggregate Competing Claims?’, Ethics vol. 125, no. 1 (2014)
Voohoeve defends a partially aggregative moral theory according to which claims (such as claims to avoid harm) may be multiplied by the number of people facing them so as to outweigh competing claims that are individually stronger if and only if the competing claims are individually sufficiently close in strength to one another. This represents a middle way between fully aggregative theories such as utilitarianism and anti-aggregative theories such as Scanlon's contractualism. Voorhoeve offers a rationale for the view by appeal to independent judgments about when it is permissible to decline to suffer a harm to oneself for the sake of saving someone else from a bigger harm.
- Joe Horton, ‘Aggregation, Complaints, and Risk’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 45, no. 1 (2017)
Horton argues that neither ‘ex ante’ nor an ‘ex post’ accounts of the reasons within contractualism for rejecting principles covering risky acts are satisfactory. He goes on to argue that his objections also apply to variants of contractualism that allow restricted aggregation, such as the one defended by Alex Voorhoeve, before concluding in favour of an approach that allows unrestricted aggregation—but of complaints, not (as in utilitarianism) benefits and burdens.
- R. Jay Wallace, The Moral Nexus (Princeton, 2019)
Wallace defends contractualism as the theory appropriate to morality on a ‘relational conception’, according to which all moral requirements are owed to someone, so that failure to conform to them wrongs that person. Wallace defends the relational conception in the first half of the book, and then argues for contractualism as the correct theory of morality so conceived in the second half.
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IV. Virtue ethics
According to one narrative about modern moral philosophy, it was by the end of the 19th century regarded as a contest between two ‘methods of ethics’: deontology and consequentialism. The 20th century saw the revival of a third method, inspired by classical Greek ethics. This third method has come to be known as ‘virtue ethics’. It makes the notion of a virtue theoretically central, displacing the deontological emphasis on duties or rules and the consequentialist focus on assessment of acts by reference to the good that they produce instrumentally. Critics argue that virtue ethics fails to be action-guiding, or that it is fundamentally unattractively egoistic, or that it's not really a distinctive method of ethics at all, among other objections.
Question: Are virtue ethicists right to make virtue fundamental in ethical theory?
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- Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford, 2002), pp. 8–16 and chapter 1
In the Introduction, Hursthouse clarifies some of the core ideas of the neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics that she defends in the rest of the book. Chapter 1 addresses the objection that virtue ethics lacks an adequate account of right action. Hursthouse replies by arguing that it does have an account of right action, and that the suggestion that the account is inadequate relies on unreasonable ambitions for ethics as well as excessive charity to rival theories. In the course of her reply, Hursthouse sets out the structure of her favoured form of virtue ethics, which is widely treated as paradigmatic.
- John McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’, The Monist vol. 62, no. 3 (1979)
McDowell defends an Aristotelian account of virtue as a kind of motivationally sufficient perceptual capacity whose deliverances are not codifiable in the way that much moral theory supposes that morality must be. In the course of his defence he identifies and attacks (drawing on Wittgenstein and Murdoch, among others) obstacles to the view’s acceptance in the form of philosophical doctrines about motivation and about rationality.
- Robert Johnson, ‘Virtue and Right’, Ethics vol. 113, no. 4 (2003)
After outlining the main features of virtue ethics as he understands it, Johnson argues that virtue ethicists are unable to explain why the right thing to do in cases of less than perfect virtue is not what the virtuous person would do.
- Thomas Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value (Oxford, 2001), chapter 8
Hurka distinguishes various forms of virtue ethics and deploys a battery of objections against them. Against the neo-Aristotelian form endorsed by Hursthouse and others, Hurka's most challenging charges are of redundancy, motivational inadequacy, an inability to distinguish the moral or explain its priority, and fundamental egoism.
- Roger Crisp, ‘A Third Method of Ethics?’, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research vol. 90, no. 2 (2015)
Crisp argues that virtue ethics isn’t really a novel and distinctive type of moral theory, but rather a version of deontology akin to W. D. Ross’s non-principle-based view. He ends by suggesting that what is distinctive about virtue ethics is best captured by interpreting it as endorsing virtue as intrinsically valuable.
- Julia Annas, ‘Virtue Ethics and the Charge of Egoism’, in Paul Bloomfield (ed.), Morality and Self-Interest (Oxford, 2007)
Annas is perhaps the most sophisticated contemporary virtue ethicist. In this chapter, she explores the ‘egoism’ objection to virtue ethics, focusing in particular on Hurka's articulation of it. Annas argues that the objection fails, clarifying as she does so some aspects of the structure of a plausible virtue ethics—in particular, the place of an independent account of human flourishing as a ground for the virtues.
- Mark LeBar, ‘Virtue Ethics and Deontic Constraints’, Ethics vol. 119 (2009)
LeBar considers the objection that virtue ethics gives the wrong explanation of the wrongness of harms to others by explaining by appeal to features of the agent rather than of the victim. He suggests that virtue ethicists can respond by appealing to the idea that taking up the ‘second-person standpoint’, which involves viewing others as sources of constraints on our actions, is both constitutive of virtue and indispensable for human flourishing.
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Further reading (Hide)
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Books I–II; Book VI, chapters 1, 5–13; Book VII, chapters 1–10; and Book X, chapters 6–9
- Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford, 2011); and ‘Why Virtue Ethics Does Not Have a Problem with Right Action’, in Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 4 (Oxford, 2014)
In the book, Annas develops and defends a virtue ethical view, arguing for a conception of virtue as analogous to skill. In the paper, Annas asks how virtue ethics can make sense of the demanding character of rightness that Kantian ethics interprets as a matter of categoricity and necessity. After pointing out that virtue ethics avoids certain problems with Kantian views focused on this aspect of morality, she argues that virtue ethics can at the same time in fact make good sense of the demanding character of rightness, partly by distinguishing duties as a sub-class of right acts involving prespecification associated with roles and institutions from virtuous acts in which the agent’s virtues play a part in the specification, and partly by resisting the suggestion that the demands of virtue are somehow less strong.
- Jason Kawall, ‘In Defense of the Primacy of the Virtues’, Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy vol. 3, no. 2 (2009)
Kawall defends what he takes to be the paradigmatic form of virtue ethics from objections to the way it makes virtue fundamental—in particular, to the way it gives it priority over deontic properties. At the centre of Kawall's defence is a distinction between various senses of the question ‘what makes X wrong?’ that evokes some of the discussions of Scanlon's theory.
- Julia Driver, Uneasy Virtue (Cambridge, 2001), chapters 2–3
In the first of these two chapters, Driver presents several examples of what she calls ‘virtues of ignorance’, which require their possessors to believe something against the evidence. She argues that Aristotelian virtue ethics cannot make sense of these, because of its emphasis on virtue as involving accurate perception. She goes on in the next chapter to argue that virtue does not require good intentions or good motives or any of a range of other internal conditions. Driver’s aim in making these arguments is to motivate a consequentialist account of virtue.
- Alison Hills, ‘The Intellectuals and the Virtues’, Ethics vol. 126, no. 1 (2015)
Hills defends intellectualism, the thesis that the virtuous person understands the reasons why her act is right and can articulate them, against the opposing ‘naivety’ view, which she associates with Julia Driver, Nomy Arpaly, and John McDowell, among others, and often takes the example of Huckleberry Finn as an illustration. Hills rejects Annas’s defence of intellectualism, according to which virtue is a kind of skill and skills enable the skilful to articulate their reasons (by contrast with mere knacks). She also rejects defences that appeal to tendencies to unreliability or non-robustness associated with naive virtue. Instead, she argues that an intellectual grasp of morality is needed for justice and beneficence, because of the essential role that justifying oneself plays in these, and more generally for the moral understanding that is essential to all virtue understood as full responsiveness to morality.
- Gilbert Harman, ‘Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society vol. 99, no. 1 (1999)
Harman adduces evidence from social psychology to the effect that there is no such thing as a character trait, and argues that this undermines character-based virtue ethics.
- Rachana Kamtekar, ‘Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character’, Ethics vol. 114, no. 3 (2004)
Kamtekar argues that the situationist critique of virtue ethics misfires, because the conception of a character trait that it debunks is not the conception that features in virtue ethics—namely, “an isolable and nonrational disposition to manifest a given stereotypical behavior that differs from the behavior of others and is fairly situation insensitive”. She offers alternative interpretations of the experiments motivating the critique and an account of virtue as it features in virtue ethics that stresses the involvement of practical wisdom.
- Edward Slingerland, ‘The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics’, Ethics vol. 121, no. 2 (2011)
Slingerland argues that the situationist critique relies on an mistaken understanding of the findings of empirical psychology, for there are indeed stable personality traits and these have significant predictive power (as much as the situations that situationists take to be explanatory, indeed). It also relies on conceptual misunderstandings about the implications of a trait’s or virtue’s being ‘local’ or ‘global’ that Slingerland details. Although Slingerland concedes that situationist findings still represent a challenge to virtue ethics, he argues that Confucian virtue ethics, with its emphasis on moral education and environmental manipulation, shows how to meet the challenge.
- Christine Swanton, Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View (Oxford, 2003)
Swanton defends a non-eudaimonistic account of virtue ethics, according to which a virtue is a disposition to respond in appropriate modes to items in the virtue’s ‘field’, and the ultimate value of which may differ from virtue to virtue. Swanton’s is a detailed, dense book, but it offers a counterpoint to and helpful critiques of contemporary Aristotelian views.
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V. Internal and external reasons
Can we have reasons to do things—that is, normative reasons rather than motivating reasons—even if we do not have any desires or concerns at any level that are furthered by acting in accordance with them? An influential essay by Bennard Williams effectively answers “no”, defending the view that all practical reasons are what he calls ‘internal reasons’. But if Williams is right, then it seems that many practical reasons that seem obviously to apply to us are in fact surprisingly fragile—not least moral reasons.
Question: Are there external reasons?
Priority reading (Hide)
- Bernard Williams, ‘Internal and external reasons’, in Moral Luck (Cambridge University Press, 1981)
Williams argues that there are no external reasons, appealing to ideas about motivation and the explanation of action. According to Williams, if performing an action is not appropriately favoured by elements in a person's “motivational set”, then she has no reason to perform it.'
- Kieran Setiya, ‘Introduction: Internal Reasons’, in Setiya and Paakkunainen (eds.), Internal Reasons: Contemporary Readings (MIT Press, 2011)
Setiya offers an introduction to and exposition of Williams‘s essay together with an analysis of options for responding to Williams’s arguments and a guide to some of the most important published responses.
- Christine Korsgaard, ‘Skepticism about Practical Reason’, in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
This is one of the classic responses to Williams, in which Korsgaard accepts the premiss (on which she takes Williams’s argument to be based) that practical reasons must be capable of moving us, but argues that it does not limit what reasons people have in the way that Williams thinks.
- John McDowell, ‘Might there be external reasons?’, in Altham and Harrison (eds.), World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
In another classic response, McDowell puts pressure on the notion of a “sound deliberative route” from an agent’s present motivational set, which Williams employs as a way to avoid an excessively narrow means-end conception of reasons for action. McDowell’s argument is in effect that it is only by unjustifiably restricting what counts as a sound deliberative route that Williams can sustain his resistance to the possibility of external reasons.
- Stephen Finlay, ‘The Obscurity of Internal Reasons’, Philosophers’ Imprint vol. 9, no. 7 (2009)
Finlay distinguishes what he regards as the orthodox reading of Williams’s essay, appealing to what Setiya calls ‘internalism about reasons’, from an alternative reading that he goes on to endorse and defend. According to this alternative reading, the foundation of Williams’s argument is the concept of a reason as an explanation of why the agent would be motivated if she deliberated soundly.
- Julia Markovits, Moral Reason (Oxford University Press, 2014), chapters 2–3
Markovits offers analysis of Williams’s argument before raising doubts about it. She then defends an revised internal reasons thesis that understands reasons as counting in favour of actions not in virtue of counterfactual motivation but in virtue of justificatory connections with the agent’s ends.
- T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 363–73
Scanlon argues that the universality of reasons judgments and the seeming categoricity of many of our practical reasons tell against reasons internalism. He also suggests that the most plausible version of Williams’s internalism is not going to differ in very significant ways from externalism anyway.
- Bernard Williams, ‘Replies’, in Altham and Harrison (eds.), World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Williams responds to McDowell’s argument in the first part of this set of replies. (Note the overlap with Johnson’'s critique of virtue ethics.)
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Further reading (Hide)
- Bernard Williams, ‘Internal reasons and the obscurity of blame’, in Making sense of humanity and other philosophical papers (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
After a pithy summary of his internalist view and elaboration of the notion of a ‘sound deliberative route’, Williams sets out what he sees as the two main arguments for internalism. He then discusses the apparent problem for internalism, in light of the assumption that a person justifiably blamed must have had reason to do what she is blamed for not doing, that a person can be blamed despite not having an internal reason to do what she is blamed for not doing. Williams’s response is to highlight the variety of ways in which a relevant internal reason might turn out in fact to be present, and the ways in which blame may be, as he calls it, ‘proleptic’.
- Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton University Press, 1970), chapters V–VI
In the first of these two chapters, Nagel argues that from the fact that a person must in some sense desire to do whatever she does, it does not follow that all acts must effectively be means to the satisfaction of prior desires which therefore supply the reason for acting. In fact, the agent’s apprehension of reasons for acting may be what prompts the desires. In the second of the two chapters, Nagel analyses the rational-motivational mechanisms underpinning this, using prudence as his case study.
- Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford University Press, 1994), chapter 5, especially pp. 164–75
Smith effectively accepts the internal reasons thesis, but argues that it does not deliver a relativistic account of reasons.
- Derek Parfit, On What Matters, Volume Two, sections 8–13, 83–4, and 106–8
These sections are the core of Parfit’s defence of external reasons, which consists partly of examples designed to show the intuitive plausibility of external reasons, partly of diagnoses of the attractions of Williams-style views that admit of internal reasons only, and partly of attacks on internal reasons and their importance.
- Kate Manne, ‘Internalism about reasons: sad but true?’, Philosophical Studies 167 (2014)
Manne argues from the ‘practice-based’ view of reasons that a consideration is a reason to do something only if it is apt to be offered to someone in reasoning with them. She then and that since there are limits to reasoning with someone that are set by their motivations, internalism turns out to be true.
- Neil Sinclair, ‘On the Connection between Normative Reasons and the Possibility of Acting for those Reasons’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 19 (2016)
Sinclair argues that apparent counterexamples (of the sort employed by Julia Markovits, for instance—see priority reading) to the motivational condition on normative reasons imposed by internalism are not counterexamples after all. Sinclair’s argument relies on the possibility of acting on the basis of some consideration without recognising the reason-giving aspect of that consideration. He sets out some accounts of acting for a reason that make room for this possibility before arguing that these answer, despite appearances to the contrary, to key motivations for internalist accounts of reasons.
- Benjamin Bagley, ‘Properly Proleptic Blame’, Ethics 127 (2017)
Bagley identifies a dilemma for proponents of the attractive idea that blame is addressed to and seeks acknowledgment by its targets. On the one hand, if the target did not have a Williams-style sound deliberative route to the considerations they are blamed for neglecting, the addressive character of blame seems misplaced. On the other hand, if they did, then the hostility of blame seems misplaced. Drawing on Williams’s work, Bagley then appeals to the indeterminacy of a person's values and the role of deliberation in specifying them as a way to navigate between the two horns of the dilemma. He ends by drawing out some implications for thinking about blame, reasons, and free will.
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VI. The authority of morality
One of the most abiding questions in moral philosophy is: “why be moral?” This question presses us to find a reason that would be sufficient to persuade a sceptic (the ‘amoralist’) to comply with moral requirements. Of course, sometimes the sceptic's self-interest will favour doing the morally right thing anyway, but that doesn't seem to be the kind of reason we are seeking. Some try to show that moral reasons are constructed from self-interested reasons; others doubt that the question even makes sense. This week, we try to get to grips with the question, and we consider various strategies for addressing it.
Question: Why should I be moral?
Priority reading (Hide)
- Plato, Republic, Book II, 357a–367e
Plato has Glaucon and Adeimantus set out a fundamental challenge: to show that justice is worth pursuing for its own sake, and not merely for the sake of the consequences of being seen to have been just. Glaucon tells a story about the origins of justice (anticipating the social contract theorists) which suggests that the contrary is true, and that what's good in itself for a person is limited rather than served by justice.
- Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge, 1996), chapters 1–2
Korsgaard sets out, clarifies, and motivates what she calls “the normative question”: the question what the authority of moral principles or claims is. She distinguishes four approaches to answering it and relates them to one another. In these two chapters she criticises the first three approaches; she defends the Kantian fourth approach in the rest of the book.
- Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, edited by Mary Gregor (Cambridge, 1997), section III
In this final section of the Groundwork, Kant argues that acting under the moral law and acting freely are the same thing, and that insofar as we are rational, we cannot avoid acting under the assumption of our own freedom. He then goes on to argue that we are bound to view ourselves as fundamentally identified with our rational selves, and hence that the moral law is binding for us.
- Philippa Foot, ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’, The Philosophical Review vol. 81, no. 3 (1972)
Observing that the categorical form of moral imperatives doesn't distinguish them from imperatives of etiquette or grammar, Foot raises doubts about the binding force of morality for someone who doesn't care about it. But, she argues, that should not trouble us as much as it sometimes does: many people do care about it, after all.
- John McDowell, ‘Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volumes, vol. 52 (1978)
McDowell argues in response to Foot’s paper that an independently intelligible desire (e.g. for the well-being of others) is not needed to make sense of the rationality of moral behaviour any more than an independently intelligible desire for one’s own well-being is needed to make sense of the rationality of prudence. Instead, we can simply appeal to the light in which a virtuous agent would see the situation.
- Joseph Raz, ‘The Central Conflict: Morality and Self-Interest’, in his Engaging Reason (Oxford, 2002)
Raz argues against a conception of reasons of morality and self-interest that takes them to be at odds, attempting to debunk examples supposed to show that they are categorically or typically opposed. He then attempts to solve a puzzle about how, on the alternative view he favours, it is ever possible that doing the right thing should conflict with my self-interest (as surely it can), or that I can make self-sacrifices. His solution appeals to the idea that in paradigmatic cases of conflict, well being is not itself a source of reasons for the agent, and that acting rightly doesn't contribute to well-being in proportion to the stringency of the reasons so to act. Like much of Raz's writing, this is deep but dense and difficult reading.
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Further reading (Hide)
- David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford, 1975) sections 3, 5, 9, and Appendices II and III
Sections 3 and 5 of Hume’s Enquiry argue that morality’s standards are erected on the foundation of natural benevolence under various pressures that explain their universality and in some cases apparent tensions with that benevolence. Section 9 elaborates on some of this view’s merits. It also includes Hume’s response to the difficult case of the ‘sensible knave’ (who is akin to the possessor of Glaucon’s ring). Appenxdix II argues for the benevolence-based account over accounts that found morality on self-interest, and Appendix III expands upon Hume’s ingenious account of justice as an ‘artificial virtue’ founded ultimately on utility.
- Brad Hooker, ‘Does Moral Virtue Constitute a Benefit to the Agent?’, in Roger Crisp (ed.), How Should One Live? (Oxford, 1998)
Focusing on ‘objective list’ theories of well being, Hooker identifies a number of arguments that might be made in support of the claim that moral virtue constitutes a benefit to the agent. He argues that the fail, and that, furthermore, one of them powerfully suggests that moral virtue does not constitute such a benefit.
- Bernard Williams, ‘The Amoralist’, in his Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Cambridge, 1993)
Williams considers the challenge posed to morality by the amoralist, who doesn’t recognise moral reasons as bearing on what he should do. William’s central strategy is to raise doubts about the attractiveness of the amoralist’s position. If the position is deeply unattractive, and some of the things that look as if it can be said for it can’t really be said for it, as Williams suggests, then the amoralist may be something like a psychopath, and not as such much of a challenge for morality’s adherents (compare Foot’s comments at the end of ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’). On the other hand, if the amoralist is even a short step nearer to us than the psychopath, then arguably the genuine challenge he presents is not so deep.
- Alison Hills, The Beloved Self: Morality and the Challenge from Egoism (Oxford, 2010), Parts I–II
In Part I of the book, Hills anatomises different forms of egoism that correspond to utilitarian, Kantian, and Aristotelian forms of morality. In Part II, she argues against ambitious attempts to vindicate morality that show egoism to be irrational. Instead, she defends, drawing on resources from epistemology, a modest approach that begins from premisses that egoists wouold reject. However, as she points out at the end of Part II, there is an important problem with modest defences of morality, the ‘Problem of Disagreement’. In Part III, Hills offers arguments from moral epistemology in support of modest vindications of morality.
- J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Penguin, 1977), pp. 107–20, 189–92
Following Hobbes and Hume, Mackie represents morality in the first of these two extracts as a solution to conflict engendered by limited resources and limited sympathies, an account he illuminates with game theoretic analysis. In the second extract, he ponders the upshot of this analysis for the question of morality’s authority, conceding that it cannot support the view that acting morally is always prudentially rational.
- Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), sections 1–9, 23–24
In sections 1–9, Parfit considers the ways in which ‘S’, the ‘Self-Interest Theory’ of practical rationality, may be self-defeating, and argues that being self-defeating in these ways does not make a theory unacceptable. In sections 23–24, Parfit considers other ways in which it may be self-defeating, focusing on situations with prisoner’s dilemma-like structures. He presents the internalisation of moral dispositions as a solution motivated by S. But the arguments in sections 1–9 tell against thinking that this makes the beliefs involved in those moral dispositions true.
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VII. Blame
Many have been suspicious of blame, seeing it as too close to an expression of a desire for vengeance to be morally respectable. Philosophers sympathetic to blame have accordingly been moved to defend it. Defences have appealed to its valuable effects, to the role it plays in interpersonal relationships, and to the way it partly constitutes others for us as free. But perhaps these defences depend on blame’s being understood as less vindictive than it really is.
Question: How should we understand blame? Would we be better off without it?
Priority reading (Hide)
- Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room, New Edition (MIT Press, 2015), chapter 7
Dennett proposes a forward-looking defence of our practices of holding responsible by appeal to their good effects.
- R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Harvard University Press, 1994), chapter 3
Wallace argues that forward-looking defences of blame are false to the phenomenology and practice of blame. He goes on to present an account of blame that understands it in terms of the ‘reactive attitudes’ of resentment and indignation, among others, and of holding people responsible in terms of disposition to feel those attitudes.
- T. M. Scanlon, Moral Dimensions: Meaning, Permissibility, Blame (Harvard University Press, 2008), chapter 4
Scanlon argues that to be blameworthy is for one’s action to have shown something about one’s attitudes to others that impairs the relations they can have with one, and to blame someone is to judge her blameworthy and to take one’s relationship (and so appropriate conduct with respect to her) with her to be modified in light of the impairment. Focusing on reactive attitudes alone, he suggests, makes for “too thin” an account of blame.
- Susan Wolf, ‘Blame, Italian Style’, in Wallace, Kumar, and Freeman (eds.), Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Wolf argues that Scanlon’s account of blame neglects a fundamental connection between blame and anger or anger-like attitudes that go beyond mere withdrawal of good will, and suggests that blame characterised in part by the involvement of such attitudes (“angry blame”) is bound up with valuable relationships, and tends to raise questions of freedom more than Scanlonian blame.
- Angela Smith, ‘Moral Blame and Moral Protest’, in Coates and Tognazzini (eds.), Blame: its Nature and Contours (Oxford University Press, 2013)
Smith summarises doubts about sanction, reactive-attitude, and mere-moral-assessment accounts of blame before criticising Sher’s and Scanlon’s (as she sees it) more promising accounts in more detail. She argues that what is missing from these accounts is an appreciation of the sense in which blame involves protest against the attitudes implicit in wrongdoing.
- Victoria McGeer, ‘Civilizing Blame’, in Coates and Tognazzini (eds.), Blame: its Nature and Contours (Oxford University Press, 2013)
McGeer argues that too many accounts of blame ‘sanitize’ it in the hope of presenting blaming practices acceptable (e.g. not unfair to the blamed). She presents a warts-and-all evolutionary theoretical account of blame as an angry, punitive attitude that has both backwards-looking appraising and forward-looking regulative elements, and argues that it does not need sanitising; in particular, that its regulative element need not be disrespectful and that its emotional element is not superfluous.
- Bernard Williams, ‘Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame’ and ‘Nietzsche's Minimalist Moral Psychology’, in Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
In the first of these papers, Williams distinguishes ‘proleptic’ operations of blame from cases of blame as a blunter “instrument of correction and disapproval”, and argues that the obscurity in any individual instance of what blame is doing is an advantage of the internal reasons view with which he associates his account of blame. In the second paper, Williams raises suspicions about blame in the course of a discussion of Nietzchean doubts about the notion of willing.
- Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Routledge, 1986), chapter 10
This is the locus classicus of Williams’s famous critique of the “morality system”. At pp. 192–6, he discusses blame in particular, linking the morality system’s account of blame to ideals of purity and justice and raising doubts about their expression in it.
- Benjamin Bagley, ‘Properly Proleptic Blame’, Ethics 127 (2017)
Bagley identifies a dilemma for proponents of the attractive idea that blame is addressed to and seeks acknowledgment by its targets. On the one hand, if the target did not have a Williams-style sound deliberative route to the considerations they are blamed for neglecting, the addressive character of blame seems misplaced. On the other hand, if they did, then the hostility of blame seems misplaced. Drawing on Williams’s work, Bagley then appeals to the indeterminacy of a person's values and the role of deliberation in specifying them as a way to navigate between the two horns of the dilemma. He ends by drawing out some implications for thinking about blame, reasons, and free will.
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Further reading (Hide)
- George Sher, In Praise of Blame (Oxford University Press, 2005)
Sher argues that to blame someone is to believe that she acted badly or has bad character and to desire that she should not have so acted or have such character, where this belief-desire pair explains various other attitudes and behaviours characteristic of blame. Being susceptible to blame is, moreover, a necessary concomitant of a commitment to morality.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge University Press, 2006), first and second essays
- P. F. Strawson, ‘Freedom and Resentment’, in Freedom and Resentment and other essays (Routledge, 2008)
One of the most influential philosophical texts of the twentieth century, Strawson’s essay distinguishes the ‘reactive attitudes’ of resentment, indignation, and hurt feelings (among others) in our practices of holding people responsible, arguing that doubts about free will could be answered by appeal to the value of such practices as constitutive elements in indispensable human relationships.
- Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (University of California Press, 1993), chapter 4 and endnote 1
In chapter 4, Williams gives an account of what is standardly understood to be shame as it appears in ancient Greek literature as bound up with the judgment of a generalised, internalised other who belongs to a community of shared ethical attitudes. He goes on to that elements in the ancient Greek notion had significant overlap with guilt, but were not separated off as belonging to something distinct in Homeric culture as they are taken to be now. Williams argues that recognising this sheds light on the nature of guilt and shame and some pathologies of contemporary moral thinking. In the endnote, Williams gives a kind of genealogical account of guilt as developed from a more primitive fear at the anger of an enforcer or victim and shame as at root a sense of exposure as loss of power, and suggests that development of guilt into more sophisticated forms (or philosophical constructions) costs some of what makes it valuable.
- R. Jay Wallace, ‘Dispassionate Opprobrium’, in Wallace, Kumar, and Freeman (eds.), Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Making similar points to those made by Susan Wolf (see the priority reading), Wallace criticises Scanlon’s account of blame for “leaving the blame out of blame”.
- Christopher Evan Franklin, ‘Valuing Blame’, in Coates and Tognazzini (eds.), Blame: its Nature and Contours (Oxford University Press, 2013)
Franklin argues that blame is an essential way of protecting moral values that we are required to protect by the requirement to commit to them, criticising Sher’s and Wallace’s accounts for failing, by contrast, to explain why the angry emotional character of blame is justified.
- Pamela Hieronymi, ‘The Force and Fairness of Blame’, Philosophical Perspectives vol. 18 (2004)
Hieronymi begins by describing a puzzle about the fairness of blaming a person whose wrongful acts are an understandable product of an upbringing that makes them seem almost inevitable. She then offers a careful analysis of blame, seeking the source of the ‘force’ that seems to threaten unfairness and finding it in the way in which the judgments of ill will internal to blame change the target’s relationship with the blamer. She then argues that this kind of judgment cannot be unfair, and goes on to extend the basic form of the argument to ‘reactive attitudes’ in general.
- Coleen Macnamara, ‘Taking the demands out of blame’, in Coates and Tognazzini (eds.), Blame: its Nature and Contours (Oxford University Press, 2013)
Macnamara argues against a widespread conception of blaming and other practices of holding responsible as expressing demands.
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VIII. Hypocrisy
Hypocrites attract widespread moral condemnation and are also widely thought in some sense to lack standing to criticise or blame others. But it's proven surprisingly difficlt to explain just what justifies the condemnation and why (and in what sense) they lack standing. This week we consider a range of accounts of hypocrisy and hypocrites’ standing (or lack of it). As it turns out these different accounts also shed light on the nature of morality and moral relations.
Question: What's wrong with hypocrisy, and why do hypocrites lose their standing to blame?
Priority reading (Hide)
- Eva Kittay, ‘On Hypocrisy’, Metaphilosophy vol. 13, nos. 3–4 (1983)
Kittay argues that hypocrisy is objectionable because the hypocrite “plays a part in just those spheres of life which others take most seriously, [deceiving] about herself in just those matters where one’s sincerity, the genuineness of one’s attitudes, beliefs and actions really matters.” She identifies several such matters, including friendship, piety, and good will.
- Christine McKinnon, ‘Hypocrisy, with a Note on Integrity’, American Philosophical Quarterly vol. 28, no. 4 (1991)
McKinnon argues that hypocrisy is distinguished from mere weak will by the hypocrite’s characteristic preoccupation with reputation rather than acting from deep moral concerns, which makes it a matter of integrity and its lack. Correspondingly, she argues, it subverts morality insofar as to lack integrity is to lack a strong link between the values one professes and one’s deeper motivations.
- Roger Crisp and Christopher Cowton, ‘Hypocrisy and Moral Seriousness’, American Philosophical Quarterly vol. 31 no. 4 (1994)
Crisp and Cowton argue that the many different forms that hypocrisy can take undermines any attempt to give it a unified analysis. Instead, they claim, there are several different vices of hypocrisy, different in nature but all united by the failure to take morality seriously; and this is what is bad about hypocrisy.
- R. Jay Wallace, Hypocrisy, Moral Address, and the Equal Standing of Persons, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 38 no. 4 (2010)
Wallace argues that hypocrites lose their standing by taking their own interests in avoiding blame to justify shielding themselves from it even as they take the very same interests in others not to justify shielding them from it, because this violates a fundamental commitment to equality that is internal to the very business of blaming.
- Jessica Isserow and Colin Klein, ‘Hypocrisy and Moral Authority’, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy vol. 12 (2017)
Isserow and Klein argue for an account of the way in which hypocrites lack standing to criticise others that conceives moral discourse as involving claims to moral authority—on analogy with political authority—that the hypocrite forfeits.
- Daniela Dover, ‘The Walk and the Talk’, The Philosophical Review vol. 128, no. 4 (2019)
Dover defends hypocritical criticism and the hypocrite’s standing to blame others, arguing for dialogical conception of moral interaction (and blame’s place in it) as against a view of blame as a kind of sanction that one needs special standing to impose, which she associates with Wallace and others.
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Further reading (Hide)
- Margaret Urban Walker, Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics, second edition (Oxford, 2007), pp. 109–129
Urban Walker defends a conception of integrity as reliable accountability, which she relates to a conception of morality as a dynamic medium through which we define and adjust our identities, our relationships, and our responsibilities in order to construct and maintain a shared moral world consisting of a set of mutually recognised values and expectations. In passing she explains how hypocrisy may be analysed within this conception.
- Daniel Statman, ‘Hypocrisy and self-deception’, Philosophical Psychology vol. 10 (1997)
Statman argues that hypocrisy is really almost always really self-deception, and not deserving of moral condemnation.
- Dan Turner, ‘Hypocrisy’, Metaphilosophy vol. 21 (1990)
Turner argues that hypocrisy is simply a matter of disparity between expressed and practised values, and is as such morally neutral in itself: there are examples of good hypocrisy as well as bad.
- Kyle G. Fritz and Daniel Miller, ‘Hypocrisy and the Standing to Blame’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly vol. 99 (2018)
Fritz and Miller argue that hypocrites are distinguished by a ‘differential blaming disposition’ which implies a rejection of the equal applicability of norms conferring the right to blame, which is itself grounded in the moral equality of persons. This, they say, is what costs the hypocrite her standing to blame others.
- Cristina Roadevin, ‘Hypocritical Blame, Fairness, and Standing’, Metaphilosophy, vol. 49 (2018)
Roadevin argues that the hypocrite’s failure to consider his own faults shows that he doesn’t understand the equal applicability of moral standards, which undermines his authority to demand that others examine and address their own faults.
- Benjamin Rossi, ‘The Commitment Account of Hypocrisy’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice vol. 21, no. 3
Rossi argues against differential blaming disposition accounts of hypocrisy on the grounds that they don’t account for certain examples of hypocrisy. Instead, he defends a ‘commitment account’, according to which hypocrites are disposed to communicate commitment to some norm and yet not disposed to accept blame from others for his failing to respond to the norm appropriately themselves.
- Kyle G. Fritz and Daniel Miller, ‘When Hypocrisy Undermines the Standing to Blame: a Response to Rossi’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice vol. 22 (2019)
Fritz and Miller reply to Rossi’s criticisms of the differential blaming disposition analysis of hypocrisy, and criticise Rossi’s view in turn.
- Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, The Beam and the Mote: On Blame, Standing, and Normativity (Oxford, 2023), chapters 2–3
Like Wallace, Roadevin, and Fritz and Miller, Lippert-Rasmussen explains the wrongfulness of hypocritical blame by appeal to a moral equality account. However, he argues that this is not what explains hypocrites’ loss of standing: what does that is the hypocrite’s lack of commitment to the norm she appeals to in blaming others.
- Ori Herstein, ‘Justifying Standing to Give Reasons: Hypocrisy, Minding Your Own Business, and Knowing One’s Place’ Philosophers’ Imprint vol. 20 (2020)
Herstein analyses norms of standing that restrict reason-giving, which include norms restricting hypocritical reason-giving. He argues that the right analysis shows that hypocritical reason-giving may be valid; what the norms do is not disable the standing of the hypocrite but give permission to the hypocrite’s interlocutor to ignore her, because hypocritical criticism is disrespectful.
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